Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

"Where the devil has she been so early?" thought he watching the flow of her skirts, to which she contrived to impart a somewhat exaggerated grace. "She looks too tired to have just come from a bath, and her husband is waiting for her. It is strange, and puzzles me altogether."

Madame Marneffe having vanished within, the Baron wondered what his daughter was doing in the shop. As he went in, still staring at Madame Marneffe's windows, he ran against a young man with a pale brow and sparkling gray eyes, wearing a summer coat of black merino, coarse drill trousers, and tan shoes, with gaiters, rushing away headlong; he saw him run to the house in the Rue du Doyenne, into which he went.

Hortense, on going into the shop, had at once recognized the famous group, conspicuously placed on a table in the middle and in front of the door. Even without the circumstances to which she owed her knowledge of this masterpiece, it would probably have struck her by the peculiar power which we must call the brio--the go--of great works; and the girl herself might in Italy have been taken as a model for the personification of Brio.

Not every work by a man of genius has in the same degree that brilliancy, that glory which is at once patent even to the most ignoble beholder. Thus, certain pictures by Raphael, such as the famous Transfiguration, the Madonna di Foligno, and the frescoes of the Stanze in the Vatican, do not at first captivate our admiration, as do the Violin-player in the Sciarra Palace, the portraits of the Doria family, and the Vision of Ezekiel in the Pitti Gallery, the Christ bearing His Cross in the Borghese collection, and the Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera at Milan. The Saint John the Baptist of the Tribuna, and Saint Luke painting the Virgin's portrait in the Accademia at Rome, have not the charm of the Portrait of Leo X., and of the Virgin at Dresden.